The next adventure

Matthew Hall was hired as a reporter for the Healdsburg Tribune in 2006. He has been the editor of the Windsor Times for seven years, and during that time also served as the Tribune’s editor during vacations and maternity leaves.
This is a bittersweet editorial for me as it’s the official announcement of my departure from The Windsor Times and Sonoma West Publishers. I’m joining the Santa Monica Daily press as their editor in chief on April 28. I’ll be working on two more issues of The Times and then moving to the city by the sea on April 25.
It’s a great opportunity for me, but I can honestly say I’ve never had such a mixed reaction to a life decision. I have loved living here, loved working here, loved being a part of this community and will deeply miss the people and place.
So if I love it here, why leave? There are answers to the big picture and specifically as to why Santa Monica.
We all have a personal philosophy, a creed that we try to live by. For me, I’ve always believed in a philosophy of motion. I believe that the journey is the destination and that as individuals we should always be moving toward something. Put another way, I think a man should always strive to be more than he is and that life should be a great adventure.  
After eight years here it’s deeply painful to leave a place I’ve come to love, but if I don’t leave, I’ll never know what’s over the horizon and while there is a time and place to decide to stop moving, for me that time is not now.
As for Santa Monica, it fits the requirements that my partner and I have for our lives. I decided long ago that I was only willing to live somewhere that other people went on vacation. Why live somewhere mediocre for 50 weeks just to earn enough to spend two weeks a year somewhere awesome? That life never made sense to me. Why not spend 50 weeks a year living somewhere awesome and if you want a vacation go somewhere great, fabulous, or exciting. Santa Monica is awesome and its proximity to planes, trains and automobiles means I can continue to explore, and revisit, other destinations.
So, leaving is hard, but it’s also exciting. That said, I want it on the record that I am truly grateful to everyone here. Rollie Atkinson, Barry Dugan and Kerrie Lindecker hired me for this job and in doing so they changed my life.
As a young journalist eager to make his mark, I would have worked wherever I was offered a job and would have brought all my energy to bear on the task at hand. Had I worked at a political publication, I would have become a policy wonk, if a technical publication had hired me, I’d have become a science nerd and I’d have become a numbers guy if I’d landed on a business beat.
Instead, I was lucky enough to have that energy channeled into community news, where my talents and drive were focused on the people and places around me. The lives of the people I worked with and reported on influenced me deeply. I became a community advocate, someone who came to care about improving the lives of those around him, and that probably wouldn’t have happened in another career. I became a better person and I owe that to this company and this job.
That’s not to say I didn’t become good at the technicalities of my job. I did. I have won several industry awards and I’m proud of them for what they are, I put them on my resume and mentioned them in my cover letter when I applied for my new job. However, they are not what I’m most proud of, not what I define my success here by and really, not what I care about. I’m not taking any of the plaques or certificates with me. What I did pack, what I do keep and what I do show to my friends are items like the oversize card from the boy scouts, the hand written note thanking “Mr. Journalist” for talking at career day, the note from a senior citizen happy to get her paper, copies of the Windsor Middle School Spartan that I helped produce, the WHS lanyard that I keep my keys on and the Bucket Brigade t-shirts.
The stories I’ll tell to my new coworkers will be about the paper’s role in getting the stage built on the Town Green, about the donations channeled to the service alliance and the student who read the paper to his family after being pictured in an article (and also about the time I thought a mortician was going to stab me because that’s just a great story).
I want to thank everyone who worked with me here, who sent me information and most importantly, everyone that read the paper. My success is very much the success of the community at large. Thank you for my time here. We hope to hire someone new in the coming weeks and while my email address will remain active for a while, you can also begin sending information to ed****@wd*******.com or if you want to reach me after my departure, email mh****@gm***.com.
Matthew Hall is Editor of The Windsor Times for the next two weeks.